NEW YORK, NY.- The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, in laying out thousands of 19th-century parkland acres, specified fine points down to the rock textures. The serendipities of age keep improving his designs. “Olmsted Trees” (Hirmer/University of Chicago Press, $40, 160 pp.), by the photographer Stanley Greenberg, celebrates bark that resembles barnacles, lizard skin or cooled lava. (The book includes essays by Tom Avermaete, an urban design professor; Kevin Baker, a writer; and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a social psychiatrist.) Torqued trunks have knobs and cavities that evoke human eyes and animal snouts, while roots bulge like giant paws kneading the earth. The trees shrug off signs of human intervention, dwarfing fencing and playground equipment, and appearing unfazed by carvings of lovers’ initials.
“In Miami in the 1980s: The Vanishing Architecture of a ‘Paradise Lost’” (Walther König/Distributed Art Publishers, $59.95, 184 pp.) focuses on memorable but disposable postmodern buildings that were commissioned by newly minted millionaires. The architect and researcher Charlotte von Moos led a contributor team (artist Max Creasy, architect Kersten Geers and curator Niels Olsen), exploring homes, offices, transit hubs and civic gathering places with nautical white railings, magenta and yellow facades, and sawtooth profiles. The designers were as prominent as the artist Isamu Noguchi and the firm Arquitectonica, and some buildings were given ancient-sounding names, which nonetheless offered no protection from neglectful owners and abusive tropical winds. Arquitectonica’s beachfront apartment house, the Babylon, for instance, with its multiple interwoven ziggurat wings, was condemned before it reached age 40.
Well-used kits for creating miniature cityscapes are profiled in “Building Toys: An Architect’s Collection” (Oro Editions, $45, 245 pp.). The author, John Rock, a California-based architect, has acquired American and European toys dating as far back as the mid-1800s with enticing names, like Wonderwood and Brickplayer. (Rock notes that he has illustrious predecessors in the collecting niche, including Norman Brosterman and George Wetzel, whose holdings now belong to museums.) The components of the kits are made of wood, metal, artificial stone, cardboard and plastic, and some stack and unstack easily while others require gloppy mortar or cumbersome interlocking mechanisms. The playthings form elaborately ornamented chateaus, skyscrapers taller than most children, rudimentary cabins, houses of worship with gilded finials, gas stations, bunkers and intergalactic transit hubs. The manufacturers collaborated with design celebrities such as Charles and Ray Eames and also made money with sidelines as gritty as tank treads and cigarette pack wrappers.
“African Textiles” (Abbeville, $150, 448 pp.) is an enrapturing continental survey of the possibilities of silk, cotton, wool, raffia, and bark cloth. The author team (Duncan Clarke, Vanessa Drake Moraga, Sarah Fee and MabatNgoup Ly Dumas) combed institutional and private collections for fabrics used over millenniums as clothing and for ceremonial and household purposes. Invaders, enslavers, traders and tourists affected trends in motifs, techniques and materials, bringing in European beads and Indian silk thread and creating markets for textiles with colonial inscriptions such as “Vive la France.” While much remains unknown in this under-studied field, the book yields insights about, for example, Zambians reviving bark-cloth traditions and a deposed Ethiopian queen’s chevron-embroidered dress that ended up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
